Chapter 33 (1)

A POLICE-OFFICER IN THE PART OF A VALET—THE POLICE-MASTER KOKOSHKIN—‘DISORDER IN ORDER’—DUBBELT ONCE MORE—THE PASSPORT

A few months before my father’s death Count Orlov was appointed to succeed Benckendorf. I wrote at the time to Olga Alexandrovna to ask whether she could procure me a passport for abroad or permission on some pretext or other to visit Petersburg in order to get one for myself. My old friend answered that the latter was easier to manage, and a few days later I received from Orlov the ‘Most High’ permission to visit Petersburg for a short time to arrange my affairs. My father’s illness, his death, arranging my affairs in reality, and some months spent in the country delayed me till winter. At the end of November I set off for Petersburg, having first sent a petition for a passport to the governor-general. I knew that he could not grant it because I was still under _strict_ police supervision, all I wanted was that he should send on the petition to Petersburg.

On the day of my departure I sent in the morning to get a permit from the police, but instead of a permit a policeman came to say that there were certain difficulties and that the local police-superintendent himself would come to me. He did come, and asking me to see him alone he mysteriously informed me that five years ago I had been forbidden to visit Petersburg and without the ‘Most High’ orders he could not sign the permit.

‘That won’t stand in our way,’ I said, laughing, and took the letter out of my pocket.

The police-superintendent, greatly astonished, read it, asked permission to show it to the police-master, and two hours later sent me my permit and the letter.

I must mention that my police-superintendent carried on half the conversation in extraordinarily polished French. How mischievous it is for a police-superintendent, or indeed any Russian policeman, to know French, he had learnt by very bitter experience.

Some years previously a French traveller, the legitimist Chevalier Preaux, arrived in Moscow from the Caucasus. He had been in Persia and in Georgia, had seen a great deal, and was so incautious as to criticise severely the military operations in the Caucasus, and still more severely the administration of government there. Afraid that Preaux would say the same thing in Petersburg, the governor-general of the Caucasus prudently wrote to the Minister of War that Preaux was a very dangerous military agent of the French government. Preaux was living quite happily in Moscow and was very well received by Prince D. V. Golitsyn, when suddenly the latter received orders to send the Frenchman from Moscow to the frontier accompanied by a police-officer. To do anything so stupid and so rude is always more difficult to an acquaintance, and so Golitsyn after two days of hesitation invited Preaux to his house, and beginning with an eloquent introduction told him at last that reports of some sort about him, probably from the Caucasus, had reached the Tsar, who had ordered that he should leave Russia, that they would, however, give him an escort....

Preaux, incensed, observed to Golitsyn that, seeing that the government had the right to eject him, he was prepared to go, but that he would not accept an escort, since he did not consider himself a criminal who needed to be guarded.

Next day when the police-master came to Preaux the latter met him with a pistol in his hand and told him point-blank that he would not permit a police-officer to enter his room or his carriage, and that he would send the bullet through his head if he attempted to enter by force.

Golitsyn was a very decent man, which made it the more difficult for him; he sent for Veiller, the French consul, to ask his advice. The latter found a way out of the difficulty; he asked for a police-officer who spoke French well and promised to present him to Preaux as a traveller who begged Preaux for a place in his carriage on condition of paying half the travelling expenses.

From the consul’s first words Preaux guessed what it meant.

‘I don’t sell seats in my carriage,’ he said to the consul.

‘The man will be in despair.’

‘Very well,’ said Preaux, ‘I will take him for nothing, but he must undertake a few little services in return; he’s not an ill-humoured fellow I suppose, if he is I will leave him on the road.’

‘The most obliging man in the world; he will be entirely at your disposition. I thank you on his behalf.’ And the consul galloped off to Prince Golitsyn to announce his success.

In the evening Preaux and the _bona fide_ traveller set off. Preaux did not speak all the way; at the first station he went indoors and lay down on the sofa. ‘Hey,’ he shouted to his companion, ‘come here and take off my boots.’ ‘Upon my word, what next?’ ‘I tell you, take off my boots, or I will turn you out on the road; I am not going to keep you.’ The police-officer took off the boots. ‘Brush them and polish them!’ ‘That’s really too much!’ ‘Very well, you can stay here.’ The officer polished the boots.

At the next station there was the same story with his clothes, and so Preaux went on tormenting him till they reached the frontier. To console this martyr of the secret service, the Sovereign’s special attention was drawn to him and in the end he was made a police-superintendent.

The third day after my arrival in Petersburg the house porter came to ask me from the local police: ‘With what papers had I come to Petersburg?’ The only paper I had, the decree concerning my retirement from the service, I had sent to the governor-general with my petition for a passport. I gave the house-porter my permit, but he came back with the remark that it was valid for leaving Moscow but not for entering Petersburg. Then a police-officer arrived with a summons to the police-master’s office. I went to Kokoshkin’s office, which was lighted by lamps though it was daytime, and within an hour he arrived. Kokoshkin more than other persons of the same order was a servant of the Tsar, a man in favour, ready to do any dirty job, with no distinct aims, no conscience, no reflection. He served and made his pile as naturally as birds sing.

Pokrovsky told Nicholas that Kokoshkin was a terrible bribe-taker. ‘Yes,’ answered Nicholas, ‘but I sleep soundly at night knowing that he is police-master in Petersburg.’

I looked at him while he was talking to other people.... What a battered old decrepitly dissolute face he had; he was wearing a curled wig which was glaringly incongruous with his sunken features and wrinkles.

After conversing with some German women in German and with a familiarity showing that they were old acquaintances, which was evident, too, from the way the women laughed and whispered, Kokoshkin came up to me, and looking down asked in a rather gruff voice: ‘Why, are not you forbidden to enter Petersburg by the “Most High”?’

‘Yes, but I have a permit.’

‘Where is it?’

‘I have it here.’

‘Show it. How’s this? You are using the same permit twice.’

‘Twice?’

‘I remember that you came before.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘And what is your business here?’

‘I have business with Count Orlov.’

‘Have you been to the Count, then?’

‘No, but I have been to the secret police.’

‘Have you seen Dubbelt?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I saw Orlov himself yesterday and he told me that he had sent you no permit.’

‘You have it in your hand.’

‘God knows when that was written, and the time has passed.’

‘It would be strange on my part to come without permission and begin with a visit to General Dubbelt.’

‘If you don’t want to get into trouble you will kindly go back, and no later than within the next twenty-four hours.’

‘I was not proposing to remain here long ... but I must wait for Count Orlov’s answer.’

‘I cannot give you leave to do so, besides Count Orlov is much displeased at your coming without permission.’

‘Kindly give me my permit and I will go at once to the Count.’

‘It must remain with me.’

‘But it is a letter to me, addressed to me personally, the only document on the strength of which I am here.’

‘The document will remain with me as a proof that you have been in Petersburg. I seriously advise you to go to-morrow that nothing worse may befall you.’

He nodded and went out. Much good it is talking to them!

The old General Tutchkov had a lawsuit with the Treasury. His village elder undertook some government contract, he did something dishonest and made away with the money entrusted to him. The court ordered that the money should be paid by the landowner who had given the village elder the authorisation. But no authorisation in regard to the undertaking ever had been given and Tutchkov stated this in his answer. The case was brought before the Senate, and the Senate again decided:

‘Inasmuch as retired Lieutenant-General Tutchkov gave an authorisation ...’ and so on. To which Tutchkov again answered: ‘Inasmuch as retired Lieutenant-General Tutchkov gave no authorisation ...’ and so on. A year passed, again the police appeared with a stern repetition: ‘Inasmuch as retired Lieutenant-General, etc.,’ and again the old man wrote the same answer. I don’t know how this interesting case ended. I left Russia without waiting for the conclusion.

All that is not at all exceptional but quite the normal thing. Kokoshkin holds in his hands a document of the genuineness of which he has no doubt, on which there is a number and date so that it can be easily verified, in which it is written that I am permitted to visit Petersburg, and says: ‘Since you have come without permission you must go back,’ and puts the document in his pocket.

Tchaadayev was right indeed when he said of these gentry: ‘What rogues they all are!’

I went to the Third Section and told Dubbelt what had happened. He roared with laughter. ‘What a muddle they always make of everything! Kokoshkin told the Count you had come without permission and the Count said you were to be sent away, but I explained the position to him afterwards; you can stay as long as you like. I’ll have the police written to at once. But now about your petition; the Count does not think it would be of any use to ask permission for you to go abroad. The Tsar has refused you twice, the last time it was Count Strogonov who interceded for you; if he refuses a third time, you won’t get to the waters during this reign, for certain.’

‘What am I to do?’ I asked in horror, for the idea of travel and freedom had taken deep root in my heart.

‘Go to Moscow: the Count will write a private letter to the governor-general telling him that you want to go abroad for the sake of your wife’s health, assuring him that he knows nothing but what is good of you, and asking him whether he thinks it would be possible to relieve you from police supervision. He can make no answer but “yes” to such a question. We will report to the Tsar the removal of police supervision, and then you take a passport for yourself like anybody else, and you can go to any watering-place you like, and good luck to you.’

All this seemed to me extremely complicated, and indeed I fancied it was a device simply to get rid of me. They could not refuse me point-blank, it would have brought down upon them the wrath of Olga Alexandrovna, whom I visited every day. When once I had left Petersburg I could not come back again; corresponding with these gentry is a difficult business. I communicated some part of what I was feeling to Dubbelt; he began frowning, that is, grinning more than ever with his lips and screwing up his eyes.

‘General,’ I said in conclusion, ‘I do not know, but the fact is I do not feel certain that Strogonov’s representation reached the Tsar.’

Dubbelt rang the bell and ordered the papers relating to my case to be brought, and while waiting for them said to me good-naturedly: ‘The Count and I are suggesting to you the course of proceeding by which we think you most likely to get your passport; if you have better means at your disposal, make use of them, you may be sure that we will not hinder you.’

‘Leonty Vassilyevitch is perfectly right,’ observed a sepulchral voice. I turned round; beside me, looking older and more grey-headed than ever, stood Sahtynsky, who had received me five years before in the same Third Section. ‘I advise you to be guided by his opinion if you want to go.’ I thanked him.

‘And here’s the case,’ said Dubbelt, taking a thick manuscript from the hands of a clerk (what would I not have given to read the whole of it! In 1850 I saw my ‘dossier’ in Carlier’s office in Paris; it would have been interesting to compare them). Turning the pages, he handed it to me open; there was Benckendorf’s entry after Strogonov’s letter petitioning for permission for me to go for six months to a watering-place in Germany. On the margin was written in big letters in pencil: ‘Too soon.’ The pencil marks were glazed over with varnish, and below was written in ink: ‘“Too soon,” written by the hand of his Imperial Majesty.—Count A. Benckendorf.’

‘Do you believe now?’ asked Dubbelt.

‘Yes, I do,’ I answered, ‘and I believe in your advice so fully that I will go to-morrow to Moscow.’

‘Well, you can stay and amuse yourself here a little, the police will not worry you now, and before you go away, look in and I will tell them to show you the letter to Shtcherbatov. Good-bye. _Bon voyage_, if we don’t meet again.’

‘A pleasant journey,’ added Sahtynsky.

We parted, as you see, on friendly terms.

On reaching home I found a summons from the superintendent of the Second Admiralty Police-Station I believe it was. He asked me when I was going.

‘To-morrow evening.’

‘Upon my word, but I believe, I thought ... the general said to-day. His Excellency will put it off, of course. But will you allow me to make certain of it?’

‘Oh yes, oh yes; by the way, give me a permit.’

‘I will write it in the police-station and send it to you in two hours’ time. By what diligence are you thinking of going?’

‘The Serapinsky, if I can get a seat.’

‘Very good, and if you do not succeed in getting a seat kindly let us know.’

‘With pleasure.’

In the evening the policeman turned up again; the superintendent sent to tell me that he could not give me the permit, and that I must go at eight o’clock next morning to the chief police-master’s.

What a plague and what a bore! I did not go at eight o’clock, but in the course of the morning I looked in at the office of the chief police-master. The police-station superintendent was there; he said to me: ‘You cannot go away, there is an order from the Third Section.’

‘What has happened?’

‘I don’t know. The general gave orders you were not to be given a permit.’

‘Does the office-manager know?’

‘Of course he knows,’ and he pointed out to me a colonel in a uniform and wearing a sword sitting at a big table in another room; I asked him what was the matter.

‘To be sure,’ he said, ‘there was an order concerning you, and here it is.’ He read it through and handed it to me. Dubbelt wrote that I had a perfect right to come to Petersburg and could remain as long as I liked.

‘And is that why you won’t let me go? Excuse me, I can’t help laughing; yesterday the chief police-master was sending me away against my will, to-day he is keeping me against my will, and all this on the ground that the document gives me leave to remain as long as I like.’

The absurdity was so evident that even the colonel-manager laughed.

‘But why should I pay for a place in the diligence twice over? Please tell them to write me a permit.’

‘I cannot, but I will go and inform the general.’

Kokoshkin told them to write me a permit, and as he walked through the office said to me reproachfully: ‘It’s beyond anything. First you want to stay, then you want to go; why, you have been told that you can stay.’

I made no answer.

When we had driven out of the city gates in the evening and I saw once more the endless plain stretching in all directions, I looked at the sky and vowed with all my heart never to return to that city of the despotism of blue, green, and variegated police, of official muddle, of flunkeyish insolence, of gendarme romance, in which the only civil man was Dubbelt, and he a chief of the secret police.

Shtcherbatov answered Orlov somewhat reluctantly. He had at that time a secretary who was not a colonel but a pietist, who hated me for my articles as an ‘atheist and Hegelian.’ I went myself to talk to him. The pious secretary, in an oily voice and with Christian unction, told me that the governor-general knew nothing about me, that he did not doubt my lofty moral qualities, but that he would have to make inquiries of the head police-master. He wanted to drag the business out; moreover, this gentleman did not take bribes. In the Russian service disinterested men are the most terrible of all; the only ones who do not take bribes in all simplicity are Germans; if a Russian does not take money he will take it out in something else and be a villain and a terror into the bargain. Fortunately the head police-master Luzhin gave me a good character.

Ten days later on returning home I stumbled upon a gendarme at my door. The appearance of a police-officer in Russia is as bad as a tile falling upon one’s head, and therefore it was not without a particularly unpleasant feeling that I waited to hear what he had to say to me; he handed me an envelope. Count Orlov informed me that his Imperial Majesty commanded that I should be relieved from police supervision. With that I received the right to a foreign passport.

‘Rejoice with me, for I am free at last!
Free to set forth to foreign lands at will!
But is it not a dream, deceiving me?
Not so! To-morrow come the post-horses,
And then “vom Ort zu Ort” I’ll gallop on,
Paying for passports what the price may be....
Well, I’ll set forth! And then—what shall I find?
I know not! I have faith! And yet—and yet—
God knows alone what still may be my fate....
With fear and doubt I stand before the gate
Of Europe. And my heart is full
Of hope, of troubled shadowy dreams....
I am in doubt, my friend, you see,
I shake my head despondingly....’

OGARYOV: Humorous Verse.[130]

Six or seven sledges accompanied us as far as Tchorny Gryaz. There for the last time we clinked glasses and parted, sobbing.

It was evening, the covered sledge crunched through the snow ... you looked mournfully after us but did not guess that it meant a funeral and eternal separation. All were there, only one was missing, the nearest of the near: he was ill, and by his absence, as it were, washed his hands of my departure.

It was the 21st of January 1847....

The sergeant gave me back our passports: a small, old soldier in a clumsy casque covered with American leather, carrying a gun of disproportionate size and weight, lifted the barrier; an Ural Cossack with narrow little eyes and broad cheek-bones, holding the reins of his little, shaggy, dishevelled nag, which was covered all over with little icicles, came up to wish me a happy journey; the pale, thin, dirty little Jewish driver with rags twisted four times round his neck clambered on the box.

‘Good-bye! Good-bye!’ said our old acquaintance, Karl Ivanovitch, who was seeing us as far as Taurogen, while Tata’s wet nurse, a handsome peasant woman, dissolved in tears as she said farewell.

The little Jew whipped up his horses, the sledges moved off. I looked back, the barrier had been lowered, the wind swept the snow from Russia: on to the road and blew the tail and mane of the Cossack’s horse to one side.

The nurse in a sarafan and a sleeveless jacket was still looking after us and weeping; Sonnenberg, that symbol of the parental home, that comic figure from the days of childhood, waved his silk handkerchief—all around was the endless plain of snow.

‘Good-bye, Tatyana! Good-bye, Karl Ivanovitch!’

Here was a milestone and on it, covered with snow, a thin and single-headed eagle with outspread wings ... and it is so much to the good that it is one head less.

Appendix

(To Chapter 29)

I

N. H. KETSCHER (1842-1847)

I must speak of Ketscher again, and this time in far more detail. On my return from exile I found him as before in Moscow—though, indeed, he had become so rooted in Moscow and so much a part of the life there that I cannot imagine Moscow without him, or him in any other city. He did try moving to Petersburg, he could not stand six months of it, threw up his position and reappeared on the banks of the Neglinny in Bazhanov’s café to preach free-thought to officers as they played billiards, to teach actors dramatic art, to translate Shakespeare, and to love and worry his old friends. It is true that he had now a new circle, _i.e._, the circle of Byelinsky and Bakunin; but though he lectured them day and night, he was still heart and soul with us.

He was then going on for forty, but he remained absolutely an old student. How did that happen? It is just that that we must investigate.

Ketscher is a perfect example of the class of strange personalities that were developed in the stagnant swamp of the Russia of the Petersburg period, especially after 1812, who were the consequence of it, the victims of it, and indirectly the stepping-stones from it to other things. These people broke away from the wearisome and ignoble common track and never found one of their own, spent their lives in seeking it and got no farther than the search. The characteristics of these victims are very varied; they are not all like Onyegin or Petchorin they are not all idle and superfluous people; there are people who work hard and yet accomplish nothing, people who are failures: I have been tempted a thousand times to describe a whole series of original figures, to draw striking portraits taken from life, but I have stopped short, overwhelmed by my material. There is nothing of the herd, of the rank and file about them; they are of all shapes and figures, but one common feature or rather one _common misfortune_ connects them all. Looking into the dark grey background, they see soldiers under the stick, serfs under the lash, faces that betray a stifled moan, carts on their way to Siberia, prisoners trudging in the same direction, shaven heads, branded faces, helmets, epaulettes, plumes ... in short, the Russia of Petersburg. It is that that torments them; they have neither the strength to accept it nor to tear themselves away nor to alter things. They try to escape from that background and cannot—they have no ground under their feet; they try to cry out against it—they have no voice, nor are there ears to hear them.

It is no wonder that with this loss of balance there are among them more original and eccentric than practically useful and perseveringly industrious people, that there is as much that is inharmonious and senseless in their lives as there is good and humane.

Ketscher’s father was a scientific instrument-maker. He was famed for his surgical instruments and extreme honesty. He died early, leaving his widow a large family to bring up and business affairs in confusion. Consequently there could be in Ketscher’s case no question of real contact, that is, of direct contact with the simple people such as is, even in a wealthy household, absorbed with one’s foster-mother’s milk, with one’s earliest games. The foreign manufacturers and traders, craftsmen and their employers, make up a narrow circle, cut off by habits, interests, and everything else both from the lower and the upper classes of Russia. Often in those circles the family life is pure and moral in comparison with the savage tyranny and hidden vice of our merchants, with the sad and dreary drunkenness of our workmen, and with the narrow, filthy life of our government clerks which rests entirely on thieving. It is, nevertheless, entirely alien to the world surrounding it, it is foreign, and from the very first gives a different _pli_ and different fundamental principles.

Ketscher’s mother was a Russian, and I imagine that it was owing to that fact that Ketscher did not grow up a foreigner. I do not think she took any part in the children’s education, but what was of the greatest consequence was that they were baptized into the Orthodox Church, which meant that they had no religion whatever. Had they been Lutherans or Catholics they would have been drawn in the German direction. They would have gone to one or other _Kirche_, and would insensibly have passed into its _Gemeinde_, with its alienating and isolating influence, with its rival coteries and its parochial interests. No one sent Ketscher to the Russian Church, of course; besides, even if he had been in the habit of going to it sometimes as a child, it has not the spider-like character of its sister churches, especially with foreigners.

It must be remembered that the period of which I am speaking knew nothing of hysterical orthodoxy. The Church, like the State, did not fly to any weapon for its defence and was not jealous of its rights, perhaps because no one was attacking them. Every one knew what these two beasts were like and no one put a finger in the jaws of either. They, for their part, did not snatch at the strangers within their gates, being doubtful of their orthodoxy or of their loyalty. When the Chair of Theology was founded in the Moscow University, old Professor Heym, famous for his lexicons, said with horror in the university hall: ‘_Es ist ein Ende mit der grossen Hochschule Ruthenias_.’ Even Magnitsky’s and Runitch’s savage epidemic of bigotry, senseless, flagrant as it was, and (as always with us) carried out by spies and policemen, passed over like a malignant storm-cloud, broke over the people who happened to be on the road, and vanished in the shape of diverse Fotys and countesses.[131] In the high schools and boarding-schools the catechism was taught as a form and for the examinations, which always began with ‘Scripture.’

In due time Ketscher entered the Academy of Medicine and Surgery. That was also a purely foreign institution and also not particularly orthodox. One of the lecturers there was Just Christian Loder, the friend of Goethe and the teacher of Humboldt, one of the pleiades of free and vigorous thinkers who have raised Germany to a height of which she never dreamed. For these men science was still a religion and propaganda a warfare; freedom from the fetters of theology was new for them; they still remembered the struggle for it, they had faith in their conquest of it and were proud of it. Loder would never have consented to teach anatomy according to the catechism of Filaret. Beside him stood Fischer of Waldheim and the surgeon Hildebrandt, of whom I have spoken in another place. There was never one word of Russian nor one Russian face in the Academy, but there were various other German laboratory assistants, demonstrators, and chemists: everything Russian was thrust into the background. There is only one exception that we remember, _i.e._, Detkovsky. Ketscher cherished his memory, and he probably had a good influence on the students. The medical students, however, made up of two species, Germans and seminarists, did not even in later days take part in the common life of the universities, but confined themselves to their own affairs.

Those affairs seemed of little account to Ketscher, which is the best proof of his not being a genuine German and not putting his profession before everything.

His own family circle could have no special attraction for him, and from early years he had preferred to live apart. The rest of his surroundings could only repel and jar upon him. He set to reading and re-reading Schiller.

In later years Ketscher translated the whole of Shakespeare, but Schiller left indelible traces upon him.

Schiller was exactly the right author for our students. Posa and Max, Karl Moor and Ferdinand were students, robber-students: it is all the protest of the first dawn, of the first revolt. More swayed by his heart than his intellect, Ketscher understood and absorbed the poetical theorising of Schiller, the revolutionary philosophy in his dialogue, and there he stopped. He was satisfied: criticism and scepticism were utterly alien to him.

A few years after his first reading of Schiller he came upon another gospel and his moral life was determined for ever. Everything else interested him little and passed without leaving a trace. The revolution of the ’nineties, that vast, colossal tragedy in the style of Schiller, with its bloodshed and its side issues, with its gloomy virtues and its bright ideals, with the same character of dawn and protest, absorbed him entirely. In this, too, Ketscher did not attempt to analyse. He accepted the French Revolution as though it were a biblical legend, he believed in it, he loved its leading figures, he had his personal preferences and dislikes among them; nothing drew him behind the scenes.

Such he was when I met him at Passek’s in 1831, and such he was when I parted from him in 1847 on the high road at Tchorny Gryaz.

This—not romantic, but so to speak ethico-political—dreamer could hardly have found the surroundings he was seeking in the Academy of Medicine and Surgery of those days. A worm was gnawing at his heart and medical science could not stifle it. Withdrawing from the persons surrounding him, he took to living more and more in one of the characters with which his imagination was filled. Continually coming into contact with very different interests and petty people, he began to shun society, got into the way of scowling, telling bitter truths that were uncalled for, and truths that every one knew, and tried to live like La Fontaine’s ‘Sonderling,’ or ‘Robinson Crusoe’ in Sokolniky. In the little garden of their house there was an arbour, and here ‘the apothecary Ketscher took refuge to translate the apothecary Schiller’ as N. A. Polevoy used to jest in those days. The door of the arbour had no lock and there was hardly room to turn round in it, but that was just right for him. In the morning he used to dig in the garden, plant and transplant flowers and shrubs, treat the poor of his district gratis, correct the proofs of ‘The Robbers’ and of ‘Fiesco,’ and instead of evening prayers would recite speeches of Marat and of Robespierre. In fact, if he had worked less with books and more with his spade, he would have been just what Rousseau wished every man to be.

Ketscher made our acquaintance through Vadim in 1831. In our circle, which consisted in those days of Sazonov, the elder Passeks, and two or three other students, besides Ogaryov and me, he saw the first promise of the accomplishment of his cherished dreams, the first signs of new growth on the fields that had been mown so thoroughly in 1826, and so he attached himself to us. Being older than we, he soon acquired ‘the rights of censorship’ and would not let us take a step without comments and sometimes reproofs. He believed that he was a practical man and more experienced than we; moreover, we liked him, liked him very much in fact. If any one fell ill, Ketscher was like a sister of mercy, and never left the invalid till he recovered. When Kolreif, Antonovitch and the others were arrested, Ketscher was the first to get into the barracks to see them, did his best to entertain them, lectured them, and went so far that Lissovsky, the general of the gendarmes, sent for him and impressed upon him that he must be more careful and must remember his position (he was an army doctor). When Nadyezhdin, who was theoretically in love, wanted to be secretly married to a young lady whose parents forbade her to think of him, Ketscher undertook to assist him and arrange a romantic elopement, and, wrapped in his celebrated black cloak lined with red, sat on a seat in the Rozhdestvensky Boulevard with Nadyezhdin waiting for a secret signal. For a long time they waited in vain; Nadyezhdin grew weary and disheartened. Ketscher stoically consoled him; despair and his consolations had a singular effect on Nadyezhdin, he fell asleep. Ketscher scowled and strode gloomily up and down the boulevard. ‘She isn’t coming,’ said Nadyezhdin, half asleep, ‘let us go home to bed.’ Ketscher scowled more than ever, shook his head gloomily, and led the sleepy Nadyezhdin home. When they had gone, the girl came out into the porch of her house and the signal agreed upon was repeated not once but a dozen times, and she waited an hour or two; all was quiet and she more quietly still returned to her room, probably shedding tears but completely cured of her love for Nadyezhdin. It was a long time before Ketscher could forgive Nadyezhdin his sleepiness; he would shake his head, while his lower lip quivered, and say: ‘He did not love her.’

The sympathy Ketscher showed at the time of our imprisonment and at the time of my marriage has been described already. For the five years from 1834 to 1840, in which he was almost the only one of our circle left in Moscow, he represented it with pride and glory, preserving our tradition, and not changing it in a single detail. So we found him, some of us in 1840 and some of us in 1842. In us exile, contact with a different world, reading, and work had made many changes. Ketscher, our irremovable representative, remained the same as ever. Only instead of Schiller he was translating Shakespeare.

One of the first things which Ketscher, who was extremely delighted at having his old friends gathered together again in Moscow, did was to renew his censorship _morum_—and this was the occasion of the first signs of friction, which for a long time he failed to notice. His scolding sometimes angered us, which had never happened in old days, and sometimes bored us. In the past we had lived at such high pressure and so much in common that no one had paid attention to little stumbling-blocks in the pathway. Time, as I have said, had made many changes; character had developed in different directions—and the part of a kind but fault-finding uncle was often worse than absurd. Every one tried to turn it into a jest, to cloak his superfluous candour and critical love under his friendliness and good intentions, and they made a great mistake. Yes, what was amiss was that it was necessary to cloak, to explain away, to practise restraint. If he had been checked from the very first, those unhappy misunderstandings with which our Moscow life ended at the beginning of 1847 would never have arisen.

Our new friends, however, were not quite so indulgent as we were, and even Byelinsky, as intolerant of injustice as Ketscher himself, would sometimes lose all patience and, though he was very fond of him, would give him severe lessons, refusing to argue with him for months together. Cold or indifferent Ketscher never was. He was invariably either violently aggressive or ardently affectionate, passing rapidly from being the warmest of friends into being the sternest of judges; this, of course, made coldness and silence harder for him to bear than anything.

Immediately after a quarrel or a series of violent attacks Ketscher’s attention was distracted, his anger passed without leaving a trace, probably he was inwardly dissatisfied with himself, but he never admitted it; on the contrary, he tried to turn everything into a joke and again overstepped the limit beyond which a joke ceases to be amusing. It was the everlasting repetition of the famous ‘gander’ in the reconciliation of Ivan Ivanovitch with Ivan Nikiforovitch.[132] Every one must have seen children who once they have yielded to temptation are nervously unable to stop short of any naughtiness, the conviction that they will be punished seems to intensify the temptation. Feeling that he had again succeeded in irritating some one into cold and biting replies, he returned to an utterly gloomy frame of mind, raised his eyebrows, strode about the room, became a tragic figure from some play of Schiller’s, a juryman from the court of Fouquier-Tinville,[133] in a ferocious voice brought out a series of accusations against all of us, accusations for which there was not the slightest foundation, convinced himself in the end of their truth, and, overwhelmed with grief that his friends were such scoundrels, went morosely home, leaving us dumbfoundered and furious, until wrath gave way to mercy and we laughed like lunatics.

Early next morning, Ketscher, mild and mournful, was pacing up and down his room, savagely smoking his pipe, waiting for one of us to come to scold him and be reconciled. He would make it up, always, of course, preserving his dignity as of an old, though exacting, uncle. If no one appeared, Ketscher, concealing a mortal dread in his heart, would go mournfully to a café in Neglinny Street, or to the bright, peaceful haven in which he was always met by a good-natured laugh and a friendly greeting, _i.e._, to M. S. Shtchepkin’s, and there stay till the storm he had raised abated. He complained of us, of course, to Schtchepkin. The kind-hearted old man gave him a good scolding, told him that he talked nonsense, that we were not such miscreants as he made out, and offered to take him at once to see us. We knew that Ketscher was miserable after his outbursts, and understood, or rather forgave, the feeling which prevented him from saying simply and directly that he was wrong and so effacing at the first word all traces of discord. The ladies, who almost always took his part, were foremost in making approaches to him. They liked his open simplicity, which went as far as rudeness (he never spared them), and regarded it as eccentricity. Their support convinced Ketscher that that was the way to behave, that it was charming and was, moreover, his duty.

Our quarrels and disputes at Pokrovskoe were sometimes full of absurdity, and at the same time whole days were overshadowed by them.

‘Why is the coffee not nice?’ I asked Matvey.

‘It has not been properly made,’ answered Ketscher, and suggested that his method should be tried. The coffee so made was just the same.

‘Bring the spirit-lamp and coffee here. I will make it myself,’ said Ketscher, and set to work. The coffee was no better, as I observed to Ketscher. He tried it and, fixing his eyes upon me from under his spectacles, asked in a voice already a little bit excited: ‘So in your opinion this coffee is no better?’

‘No.’

‘Well, it is really amazing that even in such a trifle you refuse to change your opinion.’

‘It is not I, but the coffee.’

‘Really it is beyond anything, this miserable vanity.’

‘Upon my word, I didn’t make the coffee and I didn’t make the coffee-pot....’

‘I know you, anything to prove your point; what pettiness over the beastly coffee—it’s hellish vanity!’ He could say no more; heartbroken at my despotism and vanity in matters of taste, he thrust his cap down on his head, snatched up a bark basket and went off into the woods. He came back towards evening, having walked fifteen miles; a successful search for edible fungi had dispelled his gloomy mood. I, of course, made no reference to coffee, but paid various civilities to the fungi.

Next morning he tried to raise the coffee question again, but I declined to take up the challenge.

One of the chief subjects of our disputes was the education of my son. Education shares the fate of medicine and philosophy: on those subjects every one in the world has positive and sharply defined opinions, except the few who have devoted a long and serious study to them. Ask about the building of a bridge or draining of a swamp, and a man will tell you frankly that he is not an engineer or an agricultural expert. Begin talking about dropsy or consumption, he will suggest a remedy, one that he remembers, has heard spoken of, or that has benefited his uncle. But in questions of education he goes farther still. ‘That is my principle’ he tells you, ‘and I never depart from it; I don’t like trifling in matters of education, it is a subject I feel too keenly about.’

What ideas Ketscher was bound to have about education may be gathered to the minutest detail in the sketch we have given of his character. In this he was consistent, which is more than can be said of people who discourse on education as a rule. Ketscher’s ideas were those of Rousseau’s ‘Émile,’ and he firmly believed that the negation of everything which is done with children now would of itself be excellent education. He wanted to wrest the child from artificial life and consciously restore him to a savage condition, to that primitive independence in which equality is carried so far as to wipe out the distinction between man and the monkey.

We were ourselves not so very far removed from this view, but in him, like everything that he had once assimilated, it was a fanatical creed which admitted neither of doubt nor argument. A very real and genuine need is felt for something very different from the old-fashioned theological, scholastic, aristocratic education in which dogmatism, formalism, strained pedantic classicism, and external discipline are considered of more importance than moral development. Unluckily, in education as in everything else, the violent and revolutionary method, while breaking down the old, has given us nothing to replace it. The wild assumption of the ‘normal man,’ which the followers of Jean Jacques adopted, cut the child off from his historical surroundings, made him a foreigner in them, as though education were not the development of the life of the race in the individual.

The arguments about education were rarely confined to the theoretical field, the application was too near at hand. My son, at that time seven or eight years old, was a delicate child, very liable to attacks of fever and dysentery. This weakness lasted until our visit to Naples, or rather till we met at Sorrento a doctor of whom we knew nothing, who altered the whole system of diet and treatment. Ketscher wanted to harden him all at once like tempered steel. I would not allow it, and he was furious: ‘You are a conservative,’ he shouted angrily, ‘you are ruining the unfortunate child, you are turning him into an effeminate little gentleman and at the same time a slave.’

The child was naughty and shouted when his mother was ill. I checked him: apart from the plain necessity of doing so, it seemed to me perfectly right to make him restrain himself for the sake of somebody else, for the sake of his mother who loved him beyond measure; but Ketscher said to me gloomily:

‘What right have you to check his shouting? He ought to shout, it is no life at all. The accursed authority of parents!’

These discussions, however lightly I took them, made our relations difficult and threatened a serious estrangement between Ketscher and his friends. If this had come about, he would have been more severely punished than any one, both because he was very much devoted to us all and because he did not know how to live alone. His character was eminently expansive and not at all self-centred. Some one was necessary to him. His very work was a continual conversation with some one else, that some one else was Shakespeare. After working the whole morning he felt dull. In the summer he could walk in the country or work in his garden; but in winter there was nothing left for him but to put on his famous cloak or his rough, camel-coloured overcoat and go from near Sokolniky to us, to Arbat, or to Nikitsky Street.

His captious intolerance was due to the fact that he never had the intellectual exercise of verifying, analysing, and making problems clear: for him there were no problems; all was settled and he went straight forward without looking back. Perhaps if he had been engaged in practical work this might have been a good thing, but he had none. Active participation in active affairs was impossible, only the three uppermost grades in the service take part in them in Russia. And he transferred his thirst for activity to the private life of his friends. We were spared by theoretical work from the emptiness which gnawed at his heart. Ketscher settled all questions summarily, straight off, in one way or another—which did not matter; having once settled them, he went on without hesitating at anything, remaining obstinately faithful to his conviction.

For all that there was no serious estrangement between us till 1846. Natalie was very fond of Ketscher, he was inseparably connected with the memory of the 9th of May 1838. She knew that a tender affection lay hid under his hedgehog-like prickles and was unwilling to see that the prickles were growing and sending their roots farther and farther down.

A quarrel with Ketscher seemed to her something sinister; she fancied that if time could file away, and with such a tiny file, one of the links that had held so firmly throughout our youth, it would next attack another, and the whole chain would be broken. In the midst of sullen words and harsh answers I used to see her turn pale and entreat me with her eyes to stop, she would shake off her momentary vexation and hold out her hand. Sometimes this touched Ketscher, but he made tremendous efforts to show that he did not really care, that he was ready to make it up, but that he would perhaps go on quarrelling.

The dreadful fluctuating relation of bullying affection and yielding affection might have been prolonged at this stage for years. But new circumstances which complicated Ketscher’s life brought things to a head.

He had a love affair, as queer as everything else in his life, which made him settle down quickly in rather clammy domesticity. Ketscher’s life, which was based on the utmost simplicity, on the elementary requirements of a student’s Bohemian existence among his comrades, was suddenly transformed. A woman appeared in his home, or to be more correct a home appeared because in it there was a woman. Till then no one had conceived of Ketscher as a domestic character, for in his _chez soi_ he liked to be irregular in everything, to walk about as he lunched, to smoke between the soup and the beef, to sleep in any bed but his own, so that Konstantin Aksakov observed jestingly ‘that Ketscher was distinguished from the human species by the fact that men dine while Ketscher feeds.’ All at once he had a dwelling, a domestic hearth, a roof of his own!

This was how it happened.

A few years before, Ketscher, as he walked every day between Sokolniky and Basmanny Street, used to meet a poor, almost destitute little girl. She used to return that way, tired out and depressed, from some workshop. She was plain, shy, scared, and pathetic. No one noticed her existence, no one pitied her. Without parents or relations she had been taken for the sake of Christian charity into some dissenting community, there grew up, and left it to go to hard work with no defence or support, alone in the world. Ketscher got into conversation with her and taught her not to be afraid of him, questioning her about her sorrowful childhood and wretched existence. He was the first person in whom she found sympathy and warmth, and she attached herself to him body and soul. His life was lonely and cheerless; behind all the noise of suppers with his friends, of first nights at the Moscow theatres, and of the Bozhanovsky coffee-house, there was an emptiness in his heart which he would, of course, not have admitted to himself, but which made itself felt. The poor, colourless flower fell of itself on his bosom—and he accepted it, not thinking much about the consequence and probably not attaching special importance to the incident.

In the best and most progressive men there still exists something akin to the property qualification for the franchise in their attitude to women, and there are classes below it which are regarded as naturally destined to be victims. We have all treated them as of no account, so there is hardly any one who can dare to throw a stone.

The orphan was passionately devoted to Ketscher. Being brought up in a dissenting community had left its traces on her: she had gained from it a capacity for blind faith, for idol-worship, a capacity for persistent, concentrated fanaticism and boundless devotion. Everything that she had loved and worshipped, everything she had feared, everything she had obeyed, Christ and the Mother of God, the holy saints and the wonder-working ikon—all that she found now in Ketscher, the man who was the first to pity her, the first to be kind to her. And all this was half-hidden, half-buried, dared not express itself.